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Author Guidelines

Scope

ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI) continually strives to be the leading peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal in human-robot interaction. Publication preference is given to articles that contribute to the state of the art or advance general knowledge, have broad interest, and are written to be intelligible to a wide range of audiences. Submitted articles must achieve a high standard of scholarship. Authors must ask themselves if their research is presented well and (1) advances understanding in the field of human-robot interaction, (2) adds state-of-the-art or general information to this field, or (3) challenges existing understanding in this area of research.

THRI encourages submission of well-written papers from all fields, including robotics, computer science, engineering, design, and the behavioral and social sciences. Published scholarly papers can address topics including how people interact with robots and robotic technologies, how to improve these interactions and make new kinds of interaction possible, and the effects of such interactions on organizations or society. The editors are also interested in receiving proposals for special issues on particular technical problems or that leverage research in HRI to advance other areas such as social computing, consumer behavior, health, and education.

Format

THRI accepts manuscripts submitted as documents in the PDF or Microsoft Word format.

All manuscripts accepted for publication in any of ACM publications must be prepared in electronic formats. Articles published in ACM journals and transactions are prepared for both print and digital display in the ACM Digital Library.

Because THRI volumes have page count constraints, authors are encouraged to keep the presentation concise. It may be appropriate to place content in supplementary electronic material that accompanies the submission. Such supplementary material is made available with the paper in the ACM Digital Library after the paper is published.

Templates

The ACM authoring template is found at: http://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions. This TeX template consolidates all eight individual ACM journal and proceedings templates. The templates are updated to the latest software versions, were developed to enable accessibility features, and they use a new font set. Please note: Separate Word for Windows and Word for Mac consolidated templates are also available.

Peer Review Process

THRI accepts submissions electronically via Manuscript Central. Authors should go this site, create an account and password, login selecting "Transactions on Human-Robot Interactions", and proceed to the Author Center to submit a manuscript.

Once a submission is received, THRI editors-in-chief will review it and send it to the pertinent journal section and its senior associate editors. The editors-in-chief and a senior associate editor will read each article and determine if the article should be returned without further review or advanced to full review. The opportunity for your paper to be accepted into the review process is dependent on its readability, so you will want to make sure that your article has been written well. Rejected articles cannot be reconsidered for full review unless invited by an editor or associate editor for resubmission. An author can challenge a rejection disposition to the editors-in-chief, who will make a one-time final decision. The philosophy of this journal is that editorial board is actively engaged in review and will make a judgment rather than merely taking a vote among reviewers.

If advanced to full review, a submission will be managed by an associate editor. This associate editor will obtain full reviews by expert referees in the discipline or disciplines represented in the paper. Reviews are single-blind, meaning that the names of the reviewers are not made known to the authors. The standard number of reviews will be three and will span the disciplines that the paper covers. Our journal's goal is to complete reviews and provide a disposition decision in a timely manner. Should the article advance to revision, authors will be asked to revise within a reasonable time period, depending on the level of effort required. The revised paper, once submitted, will be reviewed.

After final revision, the paper will be edited and checked for readability. The journal’s editorial policy is that readability is a measure of a paper’s accessibility and usefulness, particularly when the audience is international and interdisciplinary. When editing is extensive or when meaning is not clear, articles will be returned to the author for further revision.

For papers that make substantive contributions but that either fail to conform closely enough to the citation standard or have insufficient English composition, authors may be required to obtain professional pre-submission copyediting. These authors will be required to provide proof that they have revised their papers in accordance with the guidelines of the copyediting service.

Our goal is to get your submission out to the HRI community as soon as possible.

We strive to complete this process from submission to decision in 3 months, though some papers can require longer periods to perform the complete and thorough evaluation required by a top journal in Human-Robot Interaction.

If at any time during this process we determine your submission is inappropriate for consideration by THRI, we will return the submission to the author immediately so the problem can be fixed or the submission can be sent to a more appropriate venue. This is in the best interest of the author and the timely publication of the submission as it avoids a lengthy review process that would nevertheless result in rejection.

Once a paper is accepted, we immediately make the entire paper freely available on the THRI website, until its THRI issue is physically published and it becomes available in the ACM Digital Library.

The journal submission process is unlike that of a conference, workshop or symposium.

There is no deadline. Submit your manuscript when it is ready.

There is no page limit. Use the least number of pages necessary to adequately describe your idea.

Recommendations

Your submission will be returned with one of the following recommendations:

Accept as is. The submission will appear in an upcoming issue of ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction.

Provisionally accept with minor revisions. If the author implements the requested revisions, the revised submission will appear in an upcoming issue. The revisions will be verified by the associate editor, who can, at their discretion, invite some of the original reviewers to review the paper again.

Provisionally accepted with major revisions. If the author implements the requested revisions, the revised submission will appear in an upcoming issue. The revisions will be verified by the original referees.

Provisional reject. The author is encouraged to submit a revised version of the manuscript, but there is no guarantee that even if the requested revisions were successfully performed that the submission would be accepted. There may be additional revisions necessary beyond the ones originally requested.

Reject. The author is encouraged to submit the manuscript elsewhere, or the manuscript does not yet meet the standards of breadth, impact, novelty or correctness required for publication by the preeminent journal in Human-Robot Interaction.

An accept with revisions decision is contingent on the timely submission of a revised manuscript, to ensure the novelty of the contribution. We expect authors to submit revised manuscripts within six months of the decision, unless a request for an extension is granted by the editors-in-chief.

Once Accepted

The acceptance email will contain the most up-to-date instructions. Authors of accepted papers will work with ACM Productions and THRI Editors to ensure proper quality of the final publication.

We are trying to improve the quality of the PDF and print images too. Please help us with that by verifying that the images in the proofs you receive have not been overly compressed.

Questions regarding the formatting of the final version of the paper should be directed to theTHRI Managing Editor.

Language Service

ACM has partnered with International Science Editing (ISE) to provide language editing services to ACM authors. ISE offers a comprehensive range of services for authors including standard and premium English language editing, as well as illustration and translation services, and also has significant international outreach, especially in China. Editing is available for both Word and LaTeX files. As an ACM author, you will receive a generous discount on ISE editing services.

ACM Computing Classification System (CCS)

An important aspect of preparing your paper for publication by ACM Press is to provide the proper indexing and retrieval information from the ACM Computing Classification System (CCS). This is beneficial to you because accurate categorization provides the reader with quick content reference, facilitating the search for related literature, as well as searches for your work in ACM's Digital Library and on other online resources.

Author Rights

ACM authors now have three ways to manage their publication rights with ACM:

A license granting ACM non-exclusive permission to publish—by choosing to pay for perpetual open access from the ACM Digital Library, authors may opt to self-manage all rights to their work.

A new Publishing License Agreement granting ACM exclusive publication rights—in choosing this license authors grant ACM the right to serve as the exclusive publisher of their work and to manage ongoing rights and permissions associated with the work, including the right to defend it against improper use by third parties. This exclusive license is roughly the equivalent of ACM’s traditional Copyright Transfer Agreement except that the author continues to hold copyright.

ACM Author-Izer Service

Once your manuscript is published, we recommend that you use the ACM Author-Izer service. This service allows you to generate and post a link on your home page or institutional repository to your published article. This link will let any visitors to your personal bibliography pages download the definitive version of the articles for free from the ACM DL. These downloads will be recorded as part of your DL usage statistics. A detailed description of the service and instructions for its use may be found at: http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service.